Ball Four (RosettaBooks Sports Classics)

by Jim Bouton

  Had a talk with Bob Tiefenauer about his knuckleball and he said he’d recently gotten a good tip from Ed Fisher. He says that when you’re pitching with the wind at your back (which is very bad for the knuckler) you throw the ball harder. This seems to keep it out ahead of the wind and it knuckles pretty good. Tief says it sounds crazy, but there’s logic to it and it seems to work. I’ll have to remember that.

  I’ve been thinking about my options in life these days. There aren’t many. If I do poorly here I could easily be dropped. I don’t think they want to pay $22,000 to some guy to pitch Triple-A. On the other hand I could be sold or traded, or brought back to Seattle. I don’t think they want me back there, though, or Schultz wouldn’t have said that about a lot of clubs needing pitchers. I see by the box scores that a lot of pitching staffs are getting bombed. It’s a lot different than last year.

  Washington lost 6–0, and I wonder if they can use some pitching help. I sure would like to be with a club in the East, because if there’s anything I want to do before I’m through it’s win a few games in Yankee Stadium, and being with Washington would give me some extra shots at them. If this sounds like a grudge, it’s only because it is.

  Got my first inning of pitching in for the Vancouver Mounties and I was only super. We were leading 15–3 when Bob Lemon asked me if I wanted to pitch an inning. I said sure and went in to pitch the ninth. I struck out the first hitter on four knuckleballs. I struck out the second hitter on five knuckleballs. And I really wanted to strike out that third guy because striking out the side is the kind of thing that gets back to the big club. But the third hitter grounded out on a 1-and-2 knuckler. Still, it was almost too easy.

  Corky Evans was the catcher. He’s a good, enthusiastic kid. He caught me in the bullpen when I warmed up and he’ll be catching me on the sidelines before the games. He’s so enthusiastic he actually jumps around and says happy things when one of our guys gets a hit. In fact the first time he jumped up and started cheering I looked around to find out what had happened. All that happened was we got another one of about twenty hits. So at least he won’t be grumbling about having to catch my knuckler.

  Meal money in Triple-A is $7.50 a day. In the big leagues it’s $15. I don’t know if they mean to have you eat half as much or half as well.

  Most baseball people have two ages, real and baseball. The older they get, the greater the discrepancy between their numbers. Some of the players were clever enough to cheat by two or three years as soon as they signed and thus were more valuable throughout their careers. I made the mistake of telling my real age right along and now it’s too late to start lying. All this explains why Bill Monbouquette was able to say a couple of years ago that he was thirty-one. I was twenty-nine at the time, and I remember him pitching for the Red Sox while I was still in school.

  The greatest all-time age put-on was engineered by Rollie Sheldon. When he signed he told scouts that he was nineteen. The Yankees brought him into spring training as a twenty-year-old phenom, and he won the James P. Dawson award as outstanding rookie of the spring, and just before the team went north it was discovered that he’d spent three years in the Air Force and three years in college and that he was actually twenty-six. By now, though, there was nothing anybody could do. And if he’d told them his real age he never would have had a chance.

  I’ve also been reflecting on Joe Schultz. I’m afraid I’m giving the impression I don’t like him or that he’s bad for the ballclub. Neither is true. I think Joe Schultz knows the guys get a kick out of the funny and nonsensical things he says, so he says them deliberately. If there’s a threat to harmony on the club I think it comes from the coaching staff.

  On the other hand, it has been said that harmony is shit. The only thing that counts is winning.

  Dick Baney is a fashion plate—I mean in a baseball uniform. There is a right way to wear a baseball uniform and a wrong way, and in order to do it right you have to break some rules. Like you’re not allowed to cut your baseball socks. But if you don’t cut your socks you’re nothing.

  I’m referring to the outside socks, the colored ones. Underneath you wear long white socks that are called sanitaries. Over those go the colored socks with the stirrups under the feet. This leaves narrow half-moons of white showing. It has become the fashion—I don’t know how it started, possibly with Frank Robinson—to have long, long stirrups with a lot of white showing. The higher your stirrups the cooler you are. Your legs look long and cool instead of dumpy and hot.

  The way to make stirrups longest, or what are called high-cuts, is to slice the stirrup and sew in some extra material. It’s against the rules, but Baney ignored them. Not only that, he took his uniform to a tailor and had it made so form-fitting the whole thing looks like it was painted on. He says this is important and the reason he did poorly his first time out was that: “I looked down at myself and I looked like a clown. I figured if I look like a clown I must be pitching like a clown, and so I did.”

  Do you know that ethyl chloride can be fun? This is a freezing agent kept around to cut the pain of cuts, bruises, sprains and broken bones. It comes in a spray can and it literally freezes anything it touches; hair, skin, blood. Also ants, spiders and other animals.

  The way you have fun with ethyl chloride is spray it on a guy who isn’t looking. First thing he knows there’s a frozen spot on his leg and the hair is so solid it can be broken off.

  Or you spray it on crawling creatures. They’re frozen, they thaw and they resume their appointed rounds. Once we froze and thawed one bug thirty times just to see if it could be done. It can.

  Hot-feet, or hot-foots, depending on your attitude toward the language, can also be fun if your life is drab and empty and puerile and full of Phil Rizzuto. I once gave Phil my famous atomic bomb hot-foot, which consists of four match heads stuck inside another match. It was such a lovely hot-foot his shoelaces caught fire and the flames were licking at his pants cuff.

  One of the great hot-foots (hot-feet?) of all time was administered to Joe Pepitone by Phil Linz. The beauty part was that Pepitone was giving a hot-foot to somebody else at the time and just as he started to turn around and grin at the havoc he had wrought, a look of horror crossed his face and he began to do an Indian dance. The hot-footer had been hot-footed (feeted?) himself. Joe Pepitone is a gas.

  APRIL

  20

  Vancouver

  Today I got hung with a loss I didn’t deserve, but possibly merited. It happened because a perfectly lovely knuckler got by the catcher. In the ensuing confusion, during which I personally covered home plate on a close play, the run scored amidst great argument. The man was out, but the umpire disagreed.

  Merritt Ranew was the catcher, and although he’s a fine fellow he had a lot of trouble with the knuckleball. Lemon suggested I stop off at the ballpark in Seattle on my way home (we haven’t moved yet) and pick up McNertney’s big glove. When I got to the stadium I spent a half-hour wandering around yelling to get somebody’s attention. I couldn’t, so I finally climbed over the fence in left field and went all the way to second base and screamed at the top of my lungs, “Is there anybody here?” No answer. “Christ,” I thought, “anybody who wants to could come into this place, dismantle it and take it away by morning.” I found the glove in the clubhouse and after I climbed back over the fence I noticed a sign that said: WARNING, GUARD DOG PATROLLING AREA. I could just see the papers the next morning: “Former Seattle Player Ripped to Shreds at Second Base.”

  APRIL

  21

  Honolulu

  There are compensations to being in the minors. Like Hawaii. Arrived here today and it’s beautiful. On the airplane, if you’re Leo Marentette you play gin rummy. Leo used to be in the Tiger organization and the first thing he asked me was “How’s Moon Man?” which is what the Tigers called Mike Marshall, the way the Pilots called Steve Hovley “Orbit.” Leo took $70 meal money from Darrell Brandon and the word is that he bought rights to Jerry Stephenson, a gin-r
ummy mark, for the five-hour plane ride.

  On the plane I discovered that Greg Goossen is afraid to fly. On the takeoff he wrapped himself around his seatbelt in the fetal position, his hands over his eyes. Then, as we were landing, he went into frenzied activity, switching the overhead light on and off, turning the air blower on and off, right and left, opening and closing his ashtray and giving instructions into a paper cup: “A little more flap, give me some more stick, all right, just a little bit, okay now, level out.”

  I asked him, “What’s the routine?”

  “I always feel better when I land them myself,” Goose explained.

  Hawaii is not exactly like the rest of the minors. The first thing they did at the ballpark was line us up on the foul line, where two Hawaiian girls presented each of us with a lei and a kiss on the cheek. When the girl got to me I bent her back over my knee and kissed her like they do in the movies. Nailed her a hell of a kiss, if I say so myself. For another there’s a topless nightclub in the Polynesian Hotel, where we’re staying, and the girls who work there live in the hotel. There’s nothing minor league about that at all, at all. I mean, Kearney, Nebraska, was never like this.

  Having been sent to the minors for at least parts of the last three seasons now, I’ve become somewhat defensive about it. It’s disturbing to be considered a failure, to have a stigma attached to you just because you’re sent down.

  For the fact is, that by any sane comparative standard, I’m much better at my job, even in Triple-A, than most successful professional people are in theirs.

  As a Triple-A player I’m one of the top thousand baseball players in the country, and when it’s considered how few actually make it out of the hundreds of thousands who try, it’s really a fantastic accomplishment. So I don’t feel like a failure, and anybody who is guilty of thinking I am will be sentenced to a long conversation with Joe Schultz’s liverwurst sandwich.

  Not that there aren’t little annoyances to being in the minors. Players have to do things that coaches do for them in the big leagues—like shag balls. Baseballs are thrown in from the outfield during batting practice and someone has to gather them up and give them to the batting-practice pitcher. In the minors the job is done by the pitcher who pitched the night before. I had forgotten this little duty when I was sold to the Seattle Angels, and when I was reminded I said—facetiously, of course—“But I’m a name player.” And I had another nickname: Name Player.

  Name Player got off the bus today and went off to inspect the Honolulu playing field where some of the Angel players I had played with last year were working out. I could see the surprised looks on their faces when they saw me. Jimmy Reese, the coach, hollered over at me, “Hey, Bouton, what are you doing down here?”

  “That’s what happens when you have a bad inning,” I said.

  Pitched again today and did not have another bad inning. It was my third appearance in three days, and the dear knuckler has been jumping. One pop-up, one groundout, one strikeout. I know this is the kind of work I need, but I’m wondering why they’re pitching me so often. They have fourteen pitchers on the staff. Could it be that somebody in Seattle thinks I need the work? Or maybe they want a last look before they release me? Release me? Good grief.

  Things are going so well I’m thinking of how much the family will enjoy Vancouver. It’s a beautiful town, with the mountains coming right down to the edge of it. We’ve taken a place near the beach and it should be lovely indeed.

  I’m really riding that emotional rollercoaster these days. In spring training I was going good and getting to pitch a lot. I led the club in appearances and I was excited about making the team. And then I didn’t. All of a sudden I’m at a new low, like some crazy Dow Jones chart, and I have to start all over. Now I’ve pitched well in four games and I feel like the rollercoaster is on the way up, and that if I have three or four more good appearances I might even get called back to Seattle. In baseball you’re only as good and as happy as your last appearance.

  I read in the paper that Hoyt Wilhelm says there are only four guys throwing the knuckleball consistently in the major leagues—Wilbur Wood, Eddie Fisher, Phil Niekro and himself—and the reason is that you don’t learn to throw the knuckleball, you have to be born with it. I wonder if I was born to throw the knuckleball and have been wasting myself all these years.

  Jim Coates pitched against us tonight and beat us 4–1. Coates, as has been noted, could pose as the illustration for an undertaker’s sign. He has a personality to match. He was the kind of guy who used to get on Jimmy Piersall by calling him “Crazy.” Like, “Hey, Crazy, they coming after you with a net today?”

  Piersall used to get mad as hell and call Coates a lot of names, the most gentle of which was thermometer, but it didn’t seem to hurt the way he played. I remember a game in Washington. Piersall was playing center field and Coates was giving him hell from the Yankee bullpen. Piersall was turning away from the game to give it back when somebody hit a long fly ball to left-center and Piersall had to tear after it. All the time he was running he was screaming at Coates, and when he got up to the fence he climbed halfway up it, caught the ball, robbing somebody of a home run, and threw it in. But not for a second did he stop yelling at Coates.

  Coates was famous for throwing at people and then not getting into the fights that resulted. There’d be a big pile of guys fighting about a Coates duster and you’d see him crawling out of the pile and making for the nearest exit. So we decided that if there was a fight while Coates was pitching, instead of heading for the mound, where he was not likely to be, we’d block the exits.

  There was, of course, no fight. We’d all rather talk than fight.

  APRIL

  22

  My great roomie, Bob Lasko, has led me down the trail of sin and perdition and gotten me smashed on mai tais (pronounced “my ties”). This is a Hawaiian drink brewed by the evil gods of the volcanoes and no fit potion for a clean-cut American boy like me. I could barely make it back to my room and turn on the tape recorder. (Can you sing a book?)

  I almost can’t believe it, but I was in another ballgame tonight. Pitched two-and-a-third innings, gave up one hit, a double by Bob Rodgers, one walk and no runs. I’m throwing the knuckleball for strikes. I’m almost feeling sorry for the hitters. And I am feeling guilty about the amount of work I’m getting when a guy like Lasko is getting almost none. But not very.

  One of the natural beauties of Hawaii is the bullpen refreshment. There is a terrific soup sold in the ballpark called siamin (pronounced “sigh-a-min”), which contains native goodies, noodles, pork and herbs. Beats Cracker Jacks every time.

  APRIL

  24

  I’ve been poisoned by mai tais twice more and sunburned once in the past two days. I also pitched in two more games, coming in both times in the ninth inning with a one-run lead and giving up no hits and no sweat. After the game tonight I walked by Jimmy Reese and he said, “What are you doing in this league?”—which made me feel very nice indeed. Could all this be due to the sun and the mai tais? Is it all just an illusion?

  I’ve pitched six days in a row and everybody thinks I’ll soon be called up. Hey, up there, you listening?

  I called my wife during the seventh inning tonight because I didn’t think I’d be used again, and just as the operator was asking her if she’d take a collect call, Sheldon came back to tell me there was a call for me to warm up. In fact, when Lemon gave the signal, the guys in the bullpen pretended they didn’t understand in order to give Sheldon time to come get me. I thought he was kidding until I saw the terrorized look on his face. So I hung up, went in and saved another. Another day, another save.

  APRIL

  25

  It’s great to be young and in Hawaii. Not only did I pitch in my seventh straight game and get my third save, but I had a smashing bowl of siamin, corn on the cob and teriyaki out in the bullpen. Major-league bullpen.

  We get up around ten in the morning, put on our bathing suits, go
down to the beach for three or four hours, come back to have a nice home-cooked meal (we all have kitchenettes and share the cooking), do some shopping and get out to the ballpark at around five. Sheldon brings a radio down to the bullpen and always asks if we want to listen to a ballgame or music. Sheldon, you must be kidding.

  Talk in the bullpen turned to Joe Schultz, and I recounted what he’d told me when he sent me down. Everybody was surprised that I didn’t get the recording: “This is a recording. Pitch two or three good games and you’ll be right back up here again. This is a recording.”

  Sheldon recalled the moment the Grim Reaper cut him down. He was in the outfield shagging and Sal Maglie stood at third base and hollered at the top of his voice, “Hey, Sheldon, Joe wants to see you in his office.” Everybody in the outfield heard.

  “I was so embarrassed, I turned red,” Sheldon said. “I had the impulse to holler, ‘Find out what he wants.’ I’m still sorry I didn’t.”

  Also a beaver-shooting story was told. It seems that the Detroit bullpen carried a pair of binoculars and a telescope. The binoculars were used to spot an interesting beaver in the stands and then the telescope was used to zero in. So when the guy using the binoculars spotted a likely subject he’d say, “Scope me.”

  Strange bullpen incident tonight. Some dum-dum fan came by with his girl, who was wearing tight slacks, bare midriff and revealing top. Naturally we all looked pretty hard. “What the hell you guys looking at?” he said. Since we figured he could guess, we didn’t say. So he started yelling and giving us the finger and like that until somebody said, “You don’t like it, big boy, come on over and we’ll talk about it.” (It’s not unusual for players to get into shouting matches with fans and yell things like “Go check your wife, there’s a ballplayer missing.”)